by Rick Bass
“He’s going to have about a two-hour grace period,” Dr. Le Page said, “before the anesthesia wears off and he starts feeling really, really sick.” Jerry nodded and shook hands with Dr. Le Page, who had already stepped out of his blue scrub suit; beneath it he was wearing a dapper gray houndstooth suit with a bright blue tie, and a starched white shirt, and black dress shoes. After having spent the previous day clinging to the belief that $5,000 an hour was usurious, Jerry found himself of the opinion now that it was a bargain; or that any price, high or low, was irrelevant, compared to the worth and beauty and wonder of Jim’s full eyesight being returned to him.
Jim had to walk with his head pointed straight down at the ground so that he could see, through his one good but fatigued eye, no farther than the tips of his shoes, and Jerry took Jim by the crook of the arm.
Even in his drugged stupor, Jim resented the help, or the fact that he needed the help, and sought to pull free from Jerry’s supporting hand, but after he did so he found himself standing alone in the parking lot, still staring down at his shoes, without a clue as to where their truck was parked; and so he had to relent and submit to being led and guided, helped—though it would only, he told himself, be for seven days. Soon enough, he would be fierce and strong and independent again, and this period of need, of deep need, would pass like a breeze, like a summer day, like a scrap of bright, colorful cloth blown by the wind.
***
It was as Dr. Le Page had predicted; they had not been back at their room for more than an hour (foolishly, stubbornly, Jim had drunk a quart of beer and eaten a pint of ice cream) before the anesthesia faded and the agony struck.
It began as the low, vague awareness of pain deep in the center of his skull, like a dull fire that soon enough catches a breath of oxygen and burns brightly; and this escalating pain (his eye soon felt as if a horse had stepped on it) was coupled quickly with an explosion of nausea and diarrhea.
It was the worst of both worlds: the pain made Jim want nothing more than to curl up on the bed, hunched on his hands and knees, motionless, in order to keep the bubble in his head tipped perfectly level—and yet the roils of nausea demanded that he stagger from the bed every five minutes and make his way into the bathroom to expel the toxins and confusions of his illness.
Dr. Le Page had prescribed pills for both the nausea and the pain, and Jim began to take them in earnest—first one, then a second, and a third, and a fourth—but either they weren’t powerful enough for the magnitude of his torment or he was simply jetting them back out with his diarrhea before they could be absorbed into his bloodstream, for his agony continued unabated.
Jerry felt terrible that there was nothing he could do. He got up and went out to fetch a bag of ice for Jim to place over the injured eye, but it was no use, nothing was of any use, and Jerry finally had to place his head under the pillows of the hide-a-bed to try to drown out the sound of Jim’s thrashings and convulsions in the next room.
All night long Jim shifted and groaned, trying unsuccessfully to find some middle place of numbness between nausea and agony; and there was no part in him, not one cell of either hope or memory, that could see or imagine an end to the misery.
The gas bubble he sought to balance so perfectly at the back of his eye was suppressing the function of the tear duct, so that even as he imagined that his injured eye was tearing, watering profusely, no fluids were emerging from that eye—there was only a dry and rapid anguished blinking and twitching—nor were any tears produced in the eye’s sympathetic partner, the uninjured one.
Jerry slept fitfully as well, his slumber interrupted by Jim’s ceaseless comings and goings, and even lonely as he was, chained to a gray-sky marriage, Jerry recognized the degree and value of his freedom: the absence of physical pain or even ailment. The love in his marriage was not the amount he had once had, when they’d first been in love and he had been unable to do any wrong in the eyes of his beloved, or even later, when she had still loved him fiercely even as his myriad imperfections and flaws and failings were revealed; but he was still strong and healthy, and there was still the hope of tomorrow: always, so much hope.
A thousand times, ten thousand times, he’d pleaded with Karen to let go of her disappointment with his multitudinous flaws and her decision (he was convinced it was a conscious choice) to remain bored. He had pleaded with her to pick up the oars and begin rowing—to strike for the far shore, even though it was unseen—even as he was slowly beginning to understand more fully each day that the issue was out of his hands.
A wind would pick up out over the water and catch the sail, or it would not. She had thrown her oars away, and when in the spirit of hope and conciliation he had handed her his, she had thrown them away, too.
Did she think she was going to live to be a hundred?
Did she think there was going to be another chance? Wake up, he wanted to tell her.
Memory, scudding in beneath him:
In their mid-thirties, they had gone up to northern Michigan to visit the Great Lakes. They had gone late in the year, to avoid all the tourists, and had rented a cabin far back in the woods, on the frozen western shore of Lake Superior. The golden leaves of birch trees had already been stripped, as had the oranging needles of the tamarack, though no snow had fallen yet. They had stayed there three days, with a fire burning constantly in the wood stove, and had dressed warmly and gone for walks along the beach, wandering slowly and stopping often to examine the wave-polished stones, collecting the prettier ones in burlap sacks to take back home.
Their next-to-last night, a storm blew in from the north, tearing not just the last of the leaves from the trees but entire limbs and branches, so that in the morning, when they went for their walk, they had to step carefully over an incredible latticework of fallen branches, with the scent of freshly crushed boughs’ thick sap sweet upon the colder air. Then, farther on, once they were out on the open beach and past the wreckage of the trees, they began to encounter a curious clustering of little birds, some bruised and battered but others appearing to be only asleep, though they were frozen stiff. They were mostly warblers, bright colorful blue and yellow and green and gold birds that neither of them recognized, and Jerry theorized that the storm had come in so quickly that it had caught and crashed into a migrating wave of them. Walking along the beach, they could discern now a sort of strand line, as if those birds had landed in the waves and been washed ashore, though they could not have been, for the waves of the lake were frozen mid-curl, and Jerry and Karen saw how the currents of flinging ice needles and poisonously cold air above had crushed and forced the tiny birds to the ground, where they died in a staggering line that seemed somehow nonetheless precise, with no one bird making it much farther than any of the others, and they all appeared to be strung as if on some imaginary thread, a macabre and beautiful necklace of the lake’s, or the storm’s, brutal making.
They had gathered the less crushed of the little birds and put them in one of their burlap bags, intending to save some of the incredible feathers. Upon returning to their cabin, they set the bag by the stove, and later in the day they heard faint cheeping. Opening the bag, they found that about half of the birds had recovered, and after releasing those, they decided not to take any feathers from the dead birds but instead chipped and chopped a large hole in the frozen ground at the edge of the great lake and buried them there, while the setting orange sun bounced its broken reflection across those opaque, frozen waves. Jerry was aware, in that moment, how strangely lucky or fortunate he felt to be standing there with Karen, and loved, and in love—how fortunate or lucky he had been to find her—and that night, their last night, they had cooked a big steak on the outdoor grill, despite the deep cold, and had each drunk a bottle of red wine, and had fallen asleep in each other’s arms after murmuring the most intimate of endearments; back then, there had been no fear, no anger, no boredom—only bright newness and wonder.
Restless in the noisy little apartment at the naval base, J
erry had rolled over and thought, as if able to send some message telepathically to Karen, Give it up, I’m not going anywhere. Wake up, he thought, for the ten thousandth time, wake up and come back; this is all there is. He stared at the ceiling and listened to Jim’s moans. Finally, he fell asleep briefly and dreamed an uninteresting but calming dream about one of his stone walls. In the dream, he was merely sitting there, staring at it, and feeling calmed and hopeful.
Near dawn, a long train passed near the apartment, rattling not just the windowpanes and furniture but even the floor. Jerry awoke and could feel the tingling in his bones, and wondered how that felt inside Jim’s skull.
Shortly after that—Jerry had just dozed back off to sleep in the first gray light of morning—he was reawakened by the twin howls of fighter jets shrieking just overhead—Warthogs, or F-15S, piercing the sky with tremendous velocity—and, a few moments after that, a sonic boom that sounded like nothing less than the end of the world. Particles of plaster drifted in crumbles and motes from the ceiling.
Jerry got up, stiff from his night on the couch, and began making coffee. Jim emerged from his room like a bear coming out of stuporous hibernation, head tipped downward as if in penance, and sat down at the table wordlessly. Jerry asked how he was feeling, and Jim said, “Better,” saying it in a way that let Jerry know he meant only better than death.
Jerry poured a cup of coffee and a glass of juice and slid them into Jim’s view, the eight-inch circle of straight-downward vision between his tipped head and the tabletop, and fixed him a little bowl of yogurt and cereal, which Jim ate slowly, noisily, still staring, of necessity, at that space right in front of and beneath him. Waiting and wondering about the future, as he crunched the dry cereal, his rear teeth grinding and clacking on it like the jaw-gnashers in hell’s lowest reaches.
“It’s good of you to do this,” Jim said. “I really appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing,” Jerry said. “I’m glad I can help out.”
***
Jim was more subdued that morning and allowed Jerry to lead him around by the arm and to accompany him to his checkup. While they waited for Dr. Le Page, a nurse came in and cleaned out Jim’s eye, taking off the old patch and squeezing some salve into the eye—leaning over and into him like a garage mechanic working under the opened hood of a truck or car. As she leaned nearly upside down to reach him, her breasts pressing into his lowered face as she worked, it appeared that she was trying to pull his face to her chest and comfort him.
In applying the salve to his eye, the nurse dislodged the bubble slightly—Jim never felt it move, nor did his vision change in any way, but suddenly all of the pent-up tears from the previous evening came flooding from the eye like water from a hose, and watery, teary snot streamed from his nostrils, and the nurse went and got tissue. Tears kept gushing from Jim’s eye, and when Dr. Le Page came in and saw this he frowned and took Jim’s face in both hands and jiggled his head slightly but firmly. The bubble repositioned itself, and almost immediately the flow was shut off.
Dr. Le Page peered and probed with mirrors and special flashlights before nodding firmly and patting Jim on the back of the head.
“I did a good job on that one,” he said. “I might have filled the bubble a little full, which is probably what’s causing the increased discomfort you’re experiencing, but I wanted to be sure. Six more days,” Dr. Le Page said. “It’s all going to be all right,” he said. “You’ll be like a new man. You won’t ever see twenty-twenty out of that eye again, but your sight will return to you. It should start getting better even by the end of the week. Six more days,” he said, and shook hands with them both and sent them on their way, with the morning still young and half a hundred other patients still waiting in line behind them to see him that day, and then as many the next day, and the next.
***
On the drive home, both men were quiet, listening to the morning radio. Jim rode with his head tipped down, concentrating on not vomiting. He wanted nothing more than to get home to his cabin, build a small fire in the stove, and sleep. If he could, he would like to sleep the whole remaining six days, and longed for some pill or prescription that would allow him to do this: to by-pass the recuperative time and instead slumber away that expanse of time as would some creature hibernating beneath a dense winter shell of snow and ice.
Jerry was depressed as always by the endless bounty of strip malls that formed the fabric of the journey between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene—but finally, after a couple of hours of traffic lights, Costcos, Pizza Connections, and Kmarts, they were back into the country and heading home, and Jerry began to relax, knowing that even if he was not returning home to love, he was at least returning to beauty; as the sun rose higher, burning off the morning’s valley-bottom fog, he felt again both a guilt and a gratitude for having been blessed with good eyesight.
The day seemed extraordinarily beautiful to him—the longer-rayed sunlight of early spring was so much softer and richer than had been the short blunt light of winter—and, though trying not to feel Pollyanna-ish, he took it upon himself to comment to Jim on all the beautiful things he was seeing: to be Jim’s eyes for him that day. To remind Jim of all the beauty that he had to look forward to upon his recovery.
It all looked so dreamlike to him that day. An old red hay truck, goggle-eyed and coming up the road toward them, listing under the burden of immense round bales of hay. The new sunlight on the yellow straw of the hay as the truck passed. So much color.
The snowy white crown and tail of a mature bald eagle wheeling above them in the cerulean sky, framed by the emerald forest beyond.
“Would you look at that,” Jerry heard himself exclaiming.
In Sandpoint, a logging truck crossed the road in front of them, loaded with such behemoths that it had taken only five logs to fill the trailer—old growth Douglas fir, with chartreuse clusters of lichens still clinging to the bark of the newly cut logs and sap still oozing from their cuts, glistening like sugar glaze in that new light.
“There’s a sight you don’t see every day anymore,” Jerry said, referring to the size of the logs.
Jim said nothing, not even a grunt, and instead continued to ride silently, holding his aching head in his hands.
Jerry remembered what Dr. Le Page had said about the bubble’s slow dissolution—how it would be absorbed into Jim’s bloodstream, and then into the lungs, before being emitted as breath, as exhalation, so that Jerry was breathing in the dissolved gas of Jim’s eye bubble, there in the cab of the truck.
Jim continued to ride in silence, head down, eyes squeezed shut. Jerry glanced at him and then back at the road, and tried to hold on to the sunny optimism that the day was reawakening in him.
Maybe when I get home it will be different, he thought. Maybe she will have decided she loves me again, or that even if she doesn’t, she will work toward getting to that place again. Maybe.
He felt something shift within him, something as subtle yet significant as a cloud passing across the sun. He looked out the other window, out at the deep blue expanse of Lake Pend Oreille. They were on the long narrow bridge that spanned its eastern harbor, heading into town from the south.
In the summer the lake was festooned with the bright flags of yachts and sailboats, but at the moment there were no boats out on its blue depths; the winter’s ice still extended several hundred yards out toward the open water, still white and brilliant in some places, but in other places it was beginning to discolor back into translucent opaqueness, with mercury-colored trails of slush revealing the paths where ice fishermen had trudged earlier in the winter.
The charred stubble where their warming fires had earlier burned (bright and warm but in no way able to burn down through the thick winter-plate of ice) remained, piles of coal and stump as random and ill sorted upon the paling ice now as bones or entrails cast there by druids interested in some prophecy already gone away. It was an astoundingly lonely visage, and made more lonesome still—Jerry fe
lt the strange thing inside him click or slip or slide further, even as if against his will—by the sight of one or two fishing huts still set up out on that waning ice; and then, somehow horrifically, he saw that some of the ice fishermen were still out there, walking out across that thinning egg-colored ice, carrying their poles and buckets and avoiding narrowly the soupy channels of disintegrating ice but pushing forward nonetheless—risking it all, risking everything, as if not out of joy but deadly habit.
From a distance, Jerry could see how dangerous it was. Already there were man-sized craters of open water out on the shelf ice, in which rested, as if in some paradoxical semblance of tranquillity, the season’s first returning ducks and geese and even swans.
It wasn’t just old people, either, who were streaming out to those distant huts; Jerry could see that plenty of the ice walkers were young people, young men and women walking together, still strong in their youth but certainly old enough to know better.
It was terrible to watch. Finally he couldn’t stand it. Jim was dozing, having just drifted off to sleep—his head rocking up and down like a dead man’s—but Jerry couldn’t help it. He pulled over to the side of the road—Jim sat bolt upright for a second with the catch of fear, then remembered his instructions, and lowered his head once more—and Jerry got out of the truck and began shrieking at the distant, colorful figures making their way across the ice.
“Hey!” he shouted. “You goddamn fools! Hey! Motherfuckers!” he shouted, beginning to curse now for all he was worth. “Go back!” He waved at them across the distance, and a few of them stopped and stared at him, and, unable to discern his words, only his gestures, began to wave back at him.
“Go back!” he ranted. “Oh, you goddamned fools, go back!” But he was unable to make himself heard to them, and after a few moments of waving back to him, they drifted on farther out across the ice, leaning into the mild south wind on the bright, sunny, beautiful day, as he stood there on the bridge in full sight and continued to rant and howl.
